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I went to a fantastic wedding yesterday. Two television writers married, legitimizing the next generation of television writers. Lovely reception up in Malibu, overlooking the water. I ate, I talked, I danced, I had a tiny root beer float served in a shot glass! And there was a hilarious and touching toast that compared the companionship found within a marriage to the scenes between James Spader and William Shatner at the end of episodes of Boston Legal. How can you not love that?!

So, while we’re here, let’s talk about those scenes and ones like them. Let’s suppose you consider yourself a joke writer, or a procedural writer, or any kind of writer except a sentimental writer. And now you have to write a scene that’s crammed with “heart.” Sure, there may be jokes in it, but the main purpose is to show an emotional connection. You might be tempted to sort of rush through the scene, to dash it off, to write this sort of place-holdery kind of dialogue that you’ve heard on other shows:

A PERSON
Well, we’ve lived through worse before.

THE OTHER PERSON
We certainly have.

A PERSON
Yes. Yes, we have, my friend.

Piffle, I cry! You can do better! This kind of writing might not come naturally to you, but you can do it. It was completely foreign to me, and I learned. So can you. On Buffy, Marti Noxon was the queen of the scene that rips your heart out. She could find that moment that made the viewer connect to their own emotion and experience. I watched, and tried to figure out how she did it.

In the episode called “The Prom,” Angel breaks up with Buffy, breaking his own non-beating heart in the process. She’s shocked and hurt and angry. And, in the line that gets me every time, there’s a moment where you suddenly realize that what’s happening is sinking in. She simply asks, “You don’t want to be with me?” Oh! Punch in the stomach! So small, so vulnerable. Go Marti!

Work on writing the emotional moments. Think about how you felt in a similar situation, and what you actually said. And what you left unsaid — the Boston Legal scenes can be very sparse, as the two men don’t pour unfiltered emotions at each other. Sparse doesn’t have to mean surfacy.

Some writers find that it helps to play music while writing these scenes. Many writers cry while writing deeply emotional scenes. You’ll feel like a fool, but the emotion will show in the writing.

Lunch: Skipped lunch, saving room for the wedding reception. At the reception, I especially enjoyed the tiny potato pancakes and the tiny root beer floats. Tiny food good!

I had a realization yesterday while eating a large bowl of pasta. I love lots and lots of parmesan cheese… or none at all. Because, as dull as an absence of parmesan is, what is far worse is a little bit that is not nearly enough. This is also true about phone calls with loved ones who are a very long way away.

Realizations are a wonderful place to look for comedy because they show you two aspects of a character’s mind – their first take on something, and then their re-evaluation. The buyback jokes I mentioned in the last post are one kind of realization – the kind where you realize you want to take back what you just said.

But there are other kinds. I find that I tend to write these jokes in pieces, because I actually have the revelation while writing them. That’s why, in my own little brain, I think of these as “truth” jokes, because in the middle of writing them, I realize what the truth of the situation is, as I see it.

Here’s a truth joke:

JAKE
She’s fascinating. She designs computer programs for a civil engineering company. She makes a typo, a bridge collapses.

ADRIAN
Really?

JAKE
Or it’s extra strong. Could go either way.

I wrote the first line, just thinking that it was amusing that Jake would be impressed by a woman who can make a bridge collapse. And then I thought about the truth of the situation and realized that math errors don’t only go one way. Suddenly I had (what I think is) a much funnier joke.

The same thing happened in a Buffy episode in which Xander is looking at a magic talisman that turns out to be simply a flattened nickel. I wrote the first sentence of what follows. And then I looked closer at my nickel.

XANDER
Washington’s still there, but he’s all smooshy. And he may be Jefferson.

I decided it would be funnier – and truer — to make Xander as dumb as I was, and have him make the realization, than it would be for him to get it right in the first place.

I was surprised how many of these I found in my writing. Apparently I do a lot of just random starting out of jokes, letting them turn into other jokes along the way. Here’s another truth joke from an Animated Buffy in which she’s been shrunk down very small – like to about 6 inches tall. She’s trying to climb a staircase, and reacting to what she sees. I knew the riser would look tall. And then I realized it would also look irregular…

BUFFY
Boy. Everything’s so tall. And… textured.

Sure, it’s not really a laugh-out-loud joke, but I kept it in the script because I was kind of tickled at the thought of Buffy noticing that and being distracted by it, in the middle of her shrinking crisis.

If you’ve written something that seems true for a character, and then you have a realization, maybe the character needs to go through the same thing. It’s a good way to keep the writing from seeming “pat,” like the characters are too smart and prepared.

Lunch: Another delightful lunch with Jeff Greenstein! I had a big bowl of pasta and the waiter brought me additional parmsesan when I asked.

I do believe I finally own a working DVD player/burner. The kind I want, with the VCR built into it to, so I can move stuff from video tape to disc. This means that the first thing I wrote that aired — my episode of “Dinosaurs” with the commercials in it — won’t be rendered unwatchable by time. Well, it will. Just a longer amount of time.

But, oh my, the struggle I’ve had getting one of these devices! I literally had three of them break on me. Three! A little internet investigation showed that one of them — a sleek little model that simply blinked “loading” for days on end and refused to do anything else — was universally troubled. Many people who bought one had the same problem. Don’t you think they’d check this out in the factory? And then, once they realized they’d sold something that wasnt so much a DVD burner as it was a dim lamp with a bulb shaped like the word “loading,” don’t you think they’d want to do something about it? Like, say, buy it back? That’s what you do when you’ve offered something of doubtful quality.

This is why the following joke form is known throughout the business as the “buy back.” This is, again, from the unproduced Animated Buffy series. Here Buffy has just inappropriately used her Slayer-Strength on the volleyball court, so she vows to restrain herself:

BUFFY
Sure. Okay. I can hold back. Call me Dairy Queen, ‘cuz here comes a soft serve.
(then)
Sorry, that was kinda lame.

The buy back raises a fairly deep question. If you’re going to tell a joke, then claim it wasn’t funny — why tell it? The answer is that you tell it to reveal character. The pun here is or isn’t funny depending on your taste. But it’s interesting to all, because we learn that Buffy was momentarily proud, then ashamed of it. The joke takes you on a little tour of Buffy’s head. “Hey, here’s a funny pun! Yikes, I just went out on a limb with a pun.”

So if you decide to use a buy back, make sure it’s right for the character, and for the mood they’re in. Because you’re not just showing off your own brain, you’re telling us something important about theirs.

Lunch: tofu weiners with sauerkraut.

/duplicate entry deleted/

Have you noticed? The healthier the grocery store, the narrower the aisles. I was in a Whole Foods Market today and I spent the whole time pulling in my arms to keep from elbowing the macaroni and goosing the poultry. But I repositioned and eventually reprovisioned.

Wow. That is one “written” little paragraph. With the labored construction and the puns and the rhymes and some fairly long and obscure words. In general, in dialogue writing, you want to avoid language that sounds “written.” Have people say “thing” a lot, and speak imprecisely, and search for the word. Unless… you’re going for a joke that plays off the fact that someone is saying something that sounds written.

Here is a particularly blatant example of what I’m talking about. On Buffy, Anya was an ancient demon transformed into a human teen. And she was the queen of using “written” dialogue. Here she is, pointing out the fact that she is jealous:

ANYA
Observe my bitter ranting! Hear the shrill edge of hysteria in my voice!

This is not naturalistic speach. This character was distinguished by her ability to produce dialogue like this. And that in itself is the joke — the notion that anyone would speak like that.

Here’s a slighlty subtler example. In another episode, a creepy guy tells Buffy about his problems with clogged ears:

PHILLIP
Now I have a kit. For ear cleaning. It has this bulb mechanism.

The magic word is “mechanism.” Most of us would say “thing.” The technical word calls to mind something tangible and tubed. We try to picture it. It’s not a word we would use because making people picture the device is creepy. Hence Phillip is creepy. This line was made all the funnier by an actor who said the word “mechanism” very slowly, with great relish. So a character we didn’t know very well was defined with the help of a bit of “written” dialogue.

But I think the best, subtlest use of this kind of dialogue is when it’s suggested that a character is using it on purpose to be self-deprecating. This works because we use it in real life this way sometimes.

Here is a nervous Buffy, having brought a date home with her. She hesitates outside her dorm room:

BUFFY
This is it. My door. It’s wood. I think. Maybe some kind of wood veneer.

How many of us casually use “veneer” on a date? The word calls attention to Buffy’s nervousness. Which is exactly what the character wanted it to do, since Buffy is subtly laughing at her own nerves in this moment.

In one last, similar, example, I came across a joke from an Animated Buffy episode. These eps were written but never produced, which is a shame, since they’re really fun. In this one, Buffy realizes she’s eaten her Mother’s breakfast by mistake. She holds up the last bite of bagel and, instead of saying, “there’s a bite left,” she says:

BUFFY
There’s a remnant.

Again, we get the sense that Buffy is being cute and a little submissive, trying to get a smile out of her mother by using an amusingly precise word.

By the way, I feel like I should apologize for using so many Buffy examples as I go through these techniques. But I have them all on my computer which makes them easy to search. And since I lived with them for so long, it’s also easy for me to summon up examples of what I want to illustrate. For other examples of the “written” kind of dialogue, look at Stewie’s lines from Family Guy… And Chandler on Friends did a lot of the self-deprecating kind, if I recall. I suspect, if you watch a night of TV with your ears attuned to this, you’ll hear it all over the place.

Lunch: The “Frank’s Fantasy” specialty burger from the place called “Mo’s” up in the Valley. Sour cream and caviar on a burger. It looks gray, but it’s delicious!

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